Submarine internet cables are a gift for spooks

It’s a golden age for spying. The subsea fibre-optic cables that carry telephone and internet traffic are a technological marvel – and a gift to intelligence agencies.

They make landfall at just a handful of locations, meaning vast quantities of data can be sucked out at one site and, according to the prolific US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, that is what British intelligence has been doing for the last 18 months.

The tapping project, known as Tempora, allows phone calls to be monitored, as well as emails on offshore American-hosted webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook. Also included are Google and Yahoo searches, and direct messages on Facebook and Twitter.

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International data

“It is astonishing access they are getting with Tempora,” says Eric King, of pressure group Privacy International in London. “Every piece of data that leaves the UK, and every piece of international data that flows through the UK – which is 99 per cent of the world’s communications – is available to them.”

King and colleagues predicted as much in 2011 when, alongside Wikileaks, they published the Spy Files– a list of providers of surveillance technologies, which included systems for performing subsea cable-tapping technology. The Tempora revelations are the first discovery of the use of such systems. “It has long been suspected that GCHQ had a programme attempting to exploit subsea cables,” says King.

Snowden then revealed that US cellphone companies are being forced to hand over records of who has called or texted who – so-called metadata – to the NSA.

Unlike PRISM, Tempora taps the content of both phone calls and internet traffic, saving call content for three days and metadata for 30 days. The project is said to generate an avalanche of data&colon; 21 million gigabytes per day, including 600 million phone calls. Sifting through this currently requires 300 GCHQ analysts and 250 NSA officers, says The Guardian, seeking, for instance, signs of terror and other criminal activity in the making. Computer algorithms perform initial searches – seeking needles in the haystack of data, The Guardian says.

Judicial oversight?

Both the NSA and the UK Foreign Office – which runs GCHQ – claim some level of judicial or ministerial oversight applies to all searches through personal data. But the fact that all data is being acquired before searches take place makes a mockery of UK and US government positions on issues like data protection, says King.

Snowden’s leaks suggested GCHQ aims to increase the number of fibre-optic cables it taps above the present 200, and that the NSA is soon set to expand its role by monitoring ISPs in India and Malaysia. King hopes sense will prevail. “We hope Snowden’s revelations on how invasive these activities have become leads to action to curtail it – to restrain the privacy abuses that have happened. I have yet to hear anybody defend this as necessary and proportionate.”